Meet Valeriy Zaluzhnyy, the commander in chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, who’s quietly leading the fight against Russia’s invaders.
Washington, Moscow and most of the world expected Russia to demolish Ukraine’s military within days.
But not Valeriy Zaluzhnyy, the commander in chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, who has orchestrated and led the fight that has left Russian forces bloody, beaten and in messy retreat.
If a single person can be credited with Ukraine’s surprising military successes so far — protecting Kyiv, the capital, and holding most other major cities amid an onslaught — it is Zaluzhnyy, a round-faced 48-year-old general who was born into a military family, and appointed as his country’s top uniformed commander by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in July 2021. Zaluzhnny and other Ukrainian commanders had been preparing for a full-on war with Russia since 2014.
Unlike, say, “Stormin’” Norman Schwarzkopf, who led U.S. troops in the first Persian Gulf War, or David Petraeus, who presided over the Iraq war and was nicknamed “King David,” Zaluzhnyy has largely avoided the spectacle of a celebrity commander — deferring that role to Zelenskyy, a former actor and comedian who has captured the public’s imagination.
In many ways Zaluzhnyy epitomizes a new generation of Ukrainian officers who cut their teeth in the grinding eight-year war in Donbas and, when not on the front, deployed to training ranges across Europe to drill with NATO forces — experiences that have sanded off many of the authoritarian edges produced by decades of rigid Soviet military training.
That collaboration with NATO has molded a group of professional-minded officers that aspired to Western standards and helped build a decentralized, empowered, more agile way of warfare than the Russian model, which has floundered in the Ukrainian mud.
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In September 2021, two months before U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration began issuing loud warnings of a Russian invasion and sharing intelligence about the troop build-up on Ukraine’s borders, Zaluzhnyy described preparing for an attack.
“I have always been talking about this since I took office — because this is a threat of full-scale aggression,” Zaluzhnyy said in an interview with Radio Svoboda at the time. “Accordingly, our task as the Armed Forces is not to wait for manna from heaven. We must prepare for this. And we do everything for this. For our part, we are conducting a set of exercises, including our Western partners, including NATO members, as well as NATO partners. We are doing everything possible to make the enemy, so to speak, less willing to implement such a scenario.”
In January, Zaluzhnyy spoke to NATO’s Military Committee, the alliance’s top body of uniformed officers, and told them Ukraine’s military was ready.
“I reminded the allies that our war has been going on since 2014, and we have been doing our job ever since,” he told the national news agency Ukrinform after the meeting.
To much of the world’s horror, the scenario of “full-scale aggression” became reality on Feb. 24 as Russian tanks rolled toward Kyiv and missiles hit targets across Ukraine. But preparation for wider combat had been ongoing since Russian troops stormed into Crimea in 2014, annexing the peninsula and turning Donbas into permanent combat zone.
Over the next years, the U.S., U.K., Canada, Poland, Lithuania and other NATO allies opened training centers in western Ukraine, including for special operations forces.
That training and battlefield experience against the Russians and their separatist proxies in Donbas allowed commanders of small, dispersed units to think for themselves, overturning the old Soviet model of top-down leadership that has paralyzed Russian units and forced top generals to venture to the front lines, where several have been killed.
“The Ukrainians are able to stay nimble,” a U.S. defense official told POLITICO, who like other current and former U.S. military officials requested anonymity to discuss assessments of how the war is going, and Ukrainian capabilities. Since 2014, Ukrainians “can better adapt and react with initiative in a way that it could not before,” the official said, adding that flexibility has been a game-changer so far against a Russian onslaught that has fielded “a larger, more capable force — who is all about its rigid plan.”
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While the commander in chief has sought to avoid any celebrity star status, the success so far in pushing back the Russian invaders makes it inevitable that he will enter Ukrainian military lore as a historic figure. And a recent patriotic video even suggested a nickname that in Ukrainian rhymes as well as Stormin’ Norman: Zalizni Nezlamnyy Zaluzhnyy — “Iron Unbreakable” Zaluzhnyy.
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If a single person can be credited with Ukraine’s surprising military successes so far, it is Valeriy Zaluzhnyy, the commander in chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces https://t.co/Hcx1gzSZOz
— POLITICO (@politico) April 8, 2022
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